The present invention relates generally to the field of high electrical power DC-to-AC converters, and more particularly to a device for converting an intense relativistic electron beam into high power AC pulses.
In general, a DC-to-AC converter has three main components:
(1) An electron gun to produce an electron beam. PA1 (2) A device to launch the electron beam. PA1 (3) A device to convert the energy of the launched beam into electrical pulses.
In conventional high power DC-to-AC converters, such as vacuum triode tubes, the current is limited by the presence of the triode grid (at very high electrical power the grid eventually evaporates). Additionally, the voltage of such a triode tube is limited by the size of the tube, since there must be a certain distance between the electrodes to prevent voltage breakdown. Consequently, the power of such triode tubes is limited to about 1 MW. The Klystron, another form of vacuum tube, converts DC energy to RF radiation. However, the highest output power from such a Klystron is of the order of 100 MW.
An option for obtaining an electrical pulse is to use an intense relativistic electron beam (IREB) and then to convert the kinetic energy of the electrons in that beam into electrical energy. This can be used in many electron devices of low efficiency (e.g., free electron lasers) in order to recover and recirculate the electron energy. The converting circuits used for collecting the electrons from the IREB and converting their kinetic energy into electrical energy should not interfere with the operation of the electron devices. One such low power system is disclosed in the U.S. Pat. No. 3,916,246 to Preist. The Preist patent extracts the kinetic energy from the electron beam in one embodiment by collecting the beam current at a potential substantially equal to the potential of the electron source. The foregoing design is extremely inductive and thus, will not work for kilo amp current--megavolt electron beams.